Remerciez-le!

Remerciez @Admin pour avoir partagé cet document gratuitement, de la manière la plus simple, en partageant sur les réseaux sociaux.

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://ww

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333949387 The Surrealist Artist's Book: Beyond the Page Article in The Princeton University library chronicle · June 2009 DOI: 10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.70.2.0265 CITATIONS 0 READS 2,806 1 author: Elza Adamowicz Queen Mary, University of London 35 PUBLICATIONS 57 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Elza Adamowicz on 22 June 2019. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. 265 The Surrealist Artist’s Book Beyond the Page elza adamowicz Within libraries’ frighteningly opaque walls, certain books are doors. —paul luard 1 hat is the surrealist book? There is no single model for the surrealist book, just as there is no single model for surrealist painting.2 The terminology used—artist’s book, livre de peintre, illus- trated book, book object, or simply surrealist book—reflects both the openness of the concept and the range of its materializations. Indeed, the surrealist book can be an imaginary or a real object. It can be open, as in René Magritte’s painting The Submissive Reader (La lectrice soumise, 1928), or mysteriously and tantalizingly closed, as in Giorgio di Chirico’s The Child’s Brain (Le cerveau de l’enfant, 1914). In its extreme forms, it can appeal not only to the eyes, but also to the sense of touch or smell: the cover for the exhibition catalogue Surrealism in 1947 at the Galerie Maeght, produced by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and Georges Hugnet (1906–1974), features a rubber breast with the cap- tion “Please touch”; the first thirty copies of Hugnet’s Oeillades ciselées en branches, with illustrations by Hans Bellmer (Paris: Editions Jeanne Bucher, 1939), were impregnated with perfume! The book can be stepped on: the stairs designed for the same 1947 exhibition were This article is a revised version of the lecture given at Princeton University on March 9, 2008, to open the exhibition curated by Julie L. Mellby in the Leonard L. Milberg Gallery for the Graphic Arts, “Notre livre: À toute épreuve: A Collaboration between Joan Miró and Paul Éluard.” 1 Paul Éluard, “Espérer réaliser la véritable lisibilité,” in Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1968), 2:812. 2 Renée Riese Hubert based the title of her excellent study Surrealism and the Book (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988) on Surrealism and Painting (Paris: Gallimard, 1965) by the surrealist leader André Breton (1896– 1966). Founded in Paris after World War I and inspired by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Surrealism was a literary and artistic avant-garde movement that promoted freedom, global revolution, and the exploration of the unconscious against all forms of social and aesthetic constraints. W 266 The cover of Le surréalisme en 1947 (Paris: Pierre à Feu, Maeght, 1947). Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ars), New York /adagp, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. made up of the spines of the Surrealists’ favorite books, from Nietz- sche to Fourier and Freud. The surrealist book can also be a bound object, as in the example of Hugnet’s binding for Valentine Hugo’s Herbe à la lune (Paris: g.l.m., 1935)]; a found object, such as Léonor Fini’s Cover of a book found on the seabed (1936); or a box, for example, Duchamp’s Boite alerte, missives lascives, in the shape of a letterbox, pro- duced as a catalogue for the 1959 Surrealist exhibition at the Daniel Cordier Gallery in Paris. 267 Postcards, telegram, and other contents of Boite alerte, missives lascives, Exposition internationale du surréalisme, 1959–1960 (Paris: Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1959). Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ars), New York /adagp, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 268 In what follows I should like to focus on surrealist books that combine a text (poems, essays, narrative) and images (lithographs, gouache, woodcuts, etchings, engravings). Princeton University Li- brary’s magnificent recent acquisition, À toute épreuve (Geneva: Gérald Cramer, 1958), which combines poems by Paul Éluard (1895–1952) and woodcuts by Joan Miró (1893–1983), will be at the center of my discussion. It is, arguably, the most beautiful of surrealist books and the most successful of interart dialogues. As Douglas Cooper wrote in his preface to the catalogue for the exhibition of À toute épreuve (Paris: Berggruen Gallery, 1958), “I consider [this book] to be one of the most perfect, moving and significant works in Miró’s entire produc- tion, as well as one of the real treasures of modern bibliophily.” 3 I should like to situate this splendid example of collaboration be- tween a poet, an artist, and a publisher within the wider context of the surrealist artist’s book. Two central aspects of the surrealist book will be explored. The first section will present an overview of the surrealist book as a material collaboration—between an artist and a poet, but also a publisher, a printer, or a binder—and will focus on the structure and fabrication of the book. Second, the page of the book will be considered as a site of dialogue where a written text echoes or confronts, clashes or simply cohabits with a visual image. the material book The art dealer, collector, and publisher Ambroise Vollard (1865– 1939) was among the first to produce luxury limited editions of the livre de peintre, for example, an edition of Paul Verlaine’s Parallèlement, with lithographs by Pierre Bonnard (1900). The market for these books developed as an extension of the market for painting and draw- ing. Artist and poet did not necessarily actively collaborate, however. Indeed, often a text from an earlier century was illustrated by a mod- ern artist, such as the Vollard edition of Honoré de Balzac’s Le chef- d’oeuvre inconnu, which included thirteen etchings and seventy-seven wood engravings by Pablo Picasso (Paris, 1931). 3 A year later, James Thrall Soby wrote: “Miró’s book has now been issued and constitutes one of the most triumphant feats of book illustration in our century.” Soby, Joan Miró (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959). short 269 It was the art historian and gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahn- weiler (1884–1979) who turned the illustrated book into a real dia- logue, or collaboration on equal terms, between an artist and a poet. Under the imprint of Éditions de la Galerie Simon he published about eighty illustrated books, bringing together avant-garde au- thors and artists, and produced some of the early surrealist illustrated books, such as Simulacres (1925), with poems by Michel Leiris and seven lithographs by André Masson. From 1926 the Surrealists had their own imprint, Les Éditions Surréalistes, which published about sixty books, mainly at author’s expense, with subscriptions for limited first editions. Other publishers of surrealist books include Guy Lévis Mano (and his imprint g.l.m.), the surrealist poet and bookbinder Georges Hugnet (Éditions de la Montagne), Iliazd (the Georgian publisher Ilia Zdanevich), and Gérald Cramer (who published À toute épreuve). From the 1940s, the art dealer and publisher Aimé Maeght also produced a number of surrealist books. His edition of Parler seul (1950), combining a 1945 poem by Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) and Pablo Picasso, woodblock engraved for but not used in Honoré de Balzac, Le chef- d’oeuvre inconnu (Paris. A. Vollard, 1931). Printing Blocks and Plates Collection, Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Prince- ton University Library. Gift of Elisabeth Roth in memory of Karl Kup. © 2009 Es- tate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York /adagp, Paris. short 270 seventy-seven color and black-and-white lithographs by Miró, was produced during the long gestation of À toute épreuve. In such ventures publishers used specialist printers for the illustrations, such as Féquet & Baudier for wood engravings, Lacourière & Fréhaut for engravings and etchings, and Mourlot Frères for lithographs. In its simplest form, collaboration consisted of the artist provid- ing a frontispiece for a book of poems or an essay, as Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) did for René Char’s Artine and for André Breton and Paul Éluard’s L’immaculée conception, both published in 1930 by the Éditions Surréalistes. In more substantial collaborations, text and image are juxtaposed on facing pages, as in Max Ernst (1891–1976) and Éluard’s collaborative book, Les malheurs des immortels (1922), discussed below.4 Although in this instance the collages were actually produced before the texts, the eye travels back and forth between text and image with- out privileging one over the other. Very rarely, texts and drawings are superimposed, as in the erotic volume by Georges Hugnet and Oscar Dominguez, Le feu au cul ([Paris: R. J. Godet, 1943]), in which the explicit sexuality of the drawings is (partly) veiled by the text.5 More often, text and images are juxtaposed on the same page, as in Fa- cile (Paris: g.l.m., 1935), which combines Éluard’s poems with Man Ray’s solarized photographs, or in Miró and Éluard’s À toute épreuve. Finally, the same artist sometimes provided both texts and images. Miró paired his poem Le lézard aux plumes d’or (Paris: Louis Broder, 1971) with fifteen original lithographs, and Max Ernst’s collage- novels La femme 100 têtes uploads/Litterature/ adamowicz-surrealist-artists-book.pdf